


Have a Nice Life

by DwarvenBeardSpores



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alcohol, Crowley can't sit in chairs, Existential Angst, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Ineffability, Midlife Crisis, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 13:27:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19210372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DwarvenBeardSpores/pseuds/DwarvenBeardSpores
Summary: In which Anathema and Crowley are just friends trying to make sense of it all.





	Have a Nice Life

**Author's Note:**

> A kind of fun little thing I finally figured out how to finish. Having more friends would be good for both of them.

“So how’s _it_ going?” Crowley asked. He was more than a little drunk, and seemed to be slowly sliding off the white armchair he’d been sitting in. For the past several minutes he’d been telling a long rambling story about humans twisting around his attempts to corrupt them. Anathema couldn’t quite tell if he was annoyed or impressed; either way it was a relief to change topics. “The whole…. no-prophecy thing?” He waved his hand in the air as though to indicate the multitude of human possibility.

Anathema snorted into her own drink. She was somehow not as drunk as Crowley, but she was getting there. “Besides overwhelmingly expansive? Besides remembering every time I make a decision that Agnes probably had an opinion on it? And I might be like her-- like they always said-- but I _know_ I’m getting everything wrong?”

“Yeah.”

“Shitty.”

Crowley shook his head in resigned sympathy. They’d started talking a few weeks after the events at Lower Tadfield, when Anathema had marched up to his door and demanded to know what to do with herself now. Crowley had not given her an answer. But she hadn’t left, and they’d gotten to talking about prophecy and magic and trying to piece together the ineffable, and by the end of the night Anathema had said, “I enjoyed that. Do you think you’d want to do it again sometime?” Crowley had beamed, and they had become something of friends.

That’s why she was in his flat now, too white and too sparse (except for the plants) but slightly safer than the rest of the world.

“C’mon,” Anathema pressed. “You know about free will. You know how it works. And you basically invented the stuff. Terrible work by the way.”

“I did not, and it’s the best thing about your lot’s design.” Crowley put down his glass and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the low coffee table. At some point he had slipped off his chair and onto the floor. Anathema was still on the couch, curled into one corner. “Why don’t… oh! Why don’t you ask Aziraphale?”

“I did,” said Anathema, and Crowley burst into laughter. “And that would have been a dirty trick if I hadn’t, giving me hope.” Aziraphale had been less help than Crowley, and had literally uttered the words _welcome to ineffability_ rather than give her a straight answer. She took another drink while Crowley composed himself.

“The thing is,” Crowley began finally, hissing a little on the sybalints, “the thing _is,_ humans do all sorts of things with it. Do you really want me to list every _possible_ use of free will I’ve seen in six thousand years because--”

“No!” Anathema said, cutting him off just in case he tried to start. “No. Not all of them. The really good ones or-- or just how you do it. That’s all I want. How do _you_ cope with being able to do anything?”

Crowley considered this. Perhaps he was actually going to answer this time. “Well,” he said. “Had some structure by doing my job and er, and avoiding my job… I _still_ haven’t heard back from them by the way… And...”

“And?”

“Good company,” Crowley said, with a wide, almost bashful smile. “You know. And I mean it’s _art_ and-- and food and-- and do you _know_ what kind of discov’ries... always inventing things, humans. Always something new.”

“That’s the _problem._ How do you _choose?_ How d’you know you’re not backing the wrong thing?”

Crowley was silent a long moment. His face went on an odd sort of journey ending with a grimace and a long drink. “It’s a thing to panic over,” he concluded grimly.

Anathema buried her face in her hands. Unfortunately, she was still holding her glass and it tipped sideways. “Oh-- oh shit. I’m sorry.”

A wet stain seeped into the pristine cushions of Crowley’s sofa. Anathema dabbed at it with her sleeve, which didn’t help, and may have actually contributed a few streaks of green dye.

“And it was so clean, too,” Anathema lamented.

Crowley waved a hand. The stain cleared up. He shrugged. “’Sss fine.”

“Oh,” said Anathema. “I suppose that explains it.”

“Splains what?”

“How everything’s--” she gestured at the sofa and the carpet and every picture-perfect furnishing. “White.”

“Oh,” said Crowley. “Yeah. Well. I mostly do stain things somewhere else.”

“I see. Why?”

Crowley shrugged. “Cause everything’s white.” He squinted at his glass, which refilled itself magically.

“Sometimes being a witch seems _so_ underwhelming,” said Anathema, and extended her glass for a refill also. It occurred to her only belatedly that it might have been prudent to worry more when messing up a literal demon's furniture. Ah well. “What were we talking about? Oh. Panic.”

Crowley snapped his fingers. “Right! Panic. I panic. Soooo... I get drunk, and I feed ducks, and I sleep a lot. How long can you sleep for again? It’s like a week, right?”

Anathema’s current best time was 18 hours straight through, but she was the sort that erred on the side of not sleeping at all. “No,” she said.

“Oh.” Crowley leaned his head on the seat of his chair and continued slouching until he seemed in danger of following his legs and slipping completely beneath the coffee table. “What about weed? I could uh, I could hook you up with my guy.”

“You’ve got a weed guy?”

Crowley waved his hand. “Or-- _Or!_ You don’t have a car yet. Get one, get a really nice one. That solves some of it.”

Anathema snorted. “Oh, right,” she said. “Cool car. What else? Cool clothes?”

“Sure,” said Crowley, who was wearing tight black jeans and a jacket that matched the latest fashion and, of course, a pair of very expensive-looking sunglasses.

“Latest technology?” Anathema guessed, before remembering that she’d seen Crowley’s laptop in his office earlier. It was brand new, and so thin it was nearly transparent.

Anathema laughed. If she was good at anything, it was interpreting patterns, and this wasn’t even that hard to follow. Throw in the job disillusionment and the only thing left was the rekindling of a sex life that Anathema wasn’t close enough to know if Crowley had ever had or ever wanted.

“What?” Crowley demanded.

“Crowley,” Anathema said. “Have you ever heard the term _midlife crisis?_ ”

Crowley stared at her from behind his sunglasses. “Yeah,” he said. “So?”

“ _So,_ well, what you’re describing.” She gestured to all of him. “Midlife. Crisis.”

“I’m immortal, actually. You do know that.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t _have_ a middle of my life.”

“It doesn’t need to be the _middle_ middle. Just, you know. When you start doing all that stuff out of existential dread. Looking young and-- you don't _look_ thousands of years old. Maybe thirty.”

“Nah,” said Crowley, finally succumbing to gravity and laying flat on the floor. “That’s just a-- That’s just a crisis, that’s just what happens. And don’ say stuff like that in front of the plants.”

“I’m not wrong,” said Anathema. “And I don’t need Agnes to tell me that.”

* * *

Three days later, around four in the morning, Anathema was woken by the shrill of her cellphone’s preset ringtone. “Whatte the fucke?” she mumbled into the phone, fearing something terrible.

“Anathema? Thank-- well, thank you for picking up.” It was Crowley, and he sounded… unwell, perhaps. On edge.

“Whatte’f the Matyre ye ferpent?” Her brain had come into focus faster than her mouth, which was still speaking Agnes’ English. She wasn’t sure if Crowley could tell the difference, but she tried to wake herself out of it anyway.

“I kept thinking about it,” Crowley said. “And I think I’ve been having a midlife crisis for the entire twentieth century. What do I _do?”_

It was definitely rude to laugh, but Anathema did anyway.

* * *

Anathema didn’t know how to help Crowley any more than he knew how to help her, but she was pretty good at picking out ice cream and snacks. Agnes had never tended to have an opinion on those. She left the wine and movie selection to Crowley, confident in the fact that she really hadn’t seen very many movies at all.

“I can’t _believe_ you’ve never seen James Bond,” Crowley said about twenty times that evening.

“I can’t believe you never plugged in your TV,” retorted Anathema, who maintained that it was not _her_ fault that Crowley’s media system experienced technical difficulties as soon as she pointed out the fundamental flaws in its setup.

Crowley stuck out his tongue.  It was concerningly long and forked. Anathema threw pretzels at his face.

In order to learn how the entertainment system worked, they’d first had to learn how Crowley’s computer worked so they could search for instructions. Crowley claimed that Anathema had an annoying habit of going about things methodically, the human way, which slowed them down. Anathema claimed that Crowley's way was the reason they were in this mess in the first place.

Then they’d watched three and a half movies, eaten quite a lot of ice cream and pretzels and granola bites that Crowley made faces at, made a pillow fort out of the cushions on Crowley’s furniture, cleaned off the inevitable stains, and gone back to the computer to see if he might not like a sofa in a more practical color, like green or something. When Anathema started to get drowsy, Crowley pulled some blankets out of thin air and told her she could sleep wherever.

This wasn’t a solution to the ongoing crises. It didn’t make the ineffable any easier to eff. It was not at all exact or precise, in fact, it was something of a mess.

But, Anathema concluded drowsily the next morning, wrapped in blankets on a loosely reconstructed sofa and listening to Crowley snore, it was _nice_.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! As always, I'd love to hear what you thought. 
> 
> I can also be found on tumblr as dwarven-beard-spores, twitter as @beardspores, and dreamwidth as DwarvenBeardSpores.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Have a Nice Life [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20392330) by [blackglass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackglass/pseuds/blackglass)




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